After setting off from the Philadelphia Naval Yard, the Forrestal is currently being towed to Brownsville, Texas, where it will be dismantled and its pieces sold for scrap. The ship as it appeared Tuesday was far from its prime, according to its former crew. It appear weather-beaten, and was missing its gun mounts.

Still, seeing the ship again stirred the memories of those who came to see the Forrestal off.

“That was an awesome ship,” said John Fogg, of Salem, who served in the U.S. Navy on the Forrestal from 1963 until 1966 on tours of the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas. “I worked on the hanger deck — we were always preparing for war, flying for 12 to 16 hours in strike actions.”

“Really, one of the only things I remember now was the food — it was baked beans 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” added Fogg, 74. “I enjoyed it, though, and I’ll never regret it. I made a lot of friends on that ship.”

The first of the "supercarriers," the Forrestal was commissioned on Sept. 29, 1955, and later decommissioned on Sept. 11, 1993, after more than 38 years of service.

The ship is most well-known for the fire that killed 132 of its crew members — with two others missing and presumed dead — in July 1967 while engaged in combat in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War. A rocket on the ship had misfired, striking an armed fighter plane parked on the deck, causing a series of explosions.

Bill Ecret, of Pennsville, is one of those who survived the fire. Former Republican presidential candidate and longtime U.S. Sen. John McCain is another. On Tuesday, Ecret made the trip to the Delaware River to mark the Forrestal’s last journey.

“I was on the 03 level, below the flight deck, when it happened; it was about 10:30 in the morning,” said Ecret, 66, who served on the Forrestal from 1967 to 1969. He described how, during the fire, he eventually made it up to the top deck.

“I helped upload some of the injured into a helicopter, and then I got on a fire hose and started fighting the fire,” he said. “There were nine explosions in the first 15 minutes of it.

“Seeing (the Forrestal) again today, I was thinking about the guys I served with who didn’t come back. Three of the guys who I worked in the shop with didn’t survive the fire — Larry Gilbert, Mario Crugnola and John Fieldler. They never found John’s body.”

Lester Kyle was another Forrestal veteran who came to see the ship one last time. A member of a Marine detachment, he served as security on the carrier from 1959 until 1961. He described a six-week cruise off the coast of Cuba during the Fidel Castro-led revolution.

“She had been in dry dock when I arrived, so there was a six-week shakedown cruise to get her ready again, and we were right off the coast of Cuba,” he said. “It was the same time that Castro was fighting, and you could see the villages that were on fire at night. They told us over the intercom that they were all the villages that Castro was burning.”

The U.S. Navy signed a one-cent contract with All Star Metals of Brownsville, Texas, last October for the towing, dismantling and recycling of Forrestal.

All Star Metals, which contracted with towing company Foss to perform the towing, will own the scrap metal, and sell it to offset the costs of operations, according to the U.S. Navy.

Kyle, 73, said he thought the Forrestal had already been scrapped years ago. However, when he read about Tuesday’s voyage he decided to come out to the river with a newly purchased camera.

“I took about 27 pictures of it as it was passing Penns Grove,” he said. “Then it went down the river, around the bend, and that’s the last time I’ll ever see it.”